Enhancing application performance with network awareness in Tactical Networks

This paper presents Telcordia´s Network Awareness Service (NAS), a suite of network sensing technologies that allows applications to adapt to medium-to-long time scale performance variations in mobile tactical wireless networks. NAS is a working software prototype developed for the purpose of measuring, estimating, and inferring network metrics that impact application performance such as congestion level, packet transmission loss rate, and available path capacity. The prototype operates in a distributed manner, publishing its metrics to tactical network applications operating on protected (so-called “red-side”) computing systems, and is compatible with communication security (COMSEC) considerations that prohibit direct monitoring of network elements on the encrypted side (so-called “black-side”) of tactical radio networks. Each NAS instance performs the following key high-level functions: (1) Collection/measurement of raw packet performance data, (2) inference of network performance metrics and (3) reporting of network performance to other NAS instances and tactical applications. NAS has been successfully integrated and demonstrated as part of the U.S. Office of Naval Research Limited Technology Experiment (LTE) at SSC-Charleston in the summer of 2010. Experimental results reported here for NAS provide proof-of-concept validation of its ability to afford timely, accurate network awareness for tactical applications, and illustrate the benefits of network awareness to command and control applications in Naval settings.